The game came back online during the afternoon, although many players still experienced login issues, especially on PS4. The game is just the latest to take the world by storm.

There’s no bigger game in the video game space these days than Fortnite, but for the past 12 hours, fans haven’t been able to play it. “The backlog is now cleared and players should receive all email notifications immediately”.

The free-to-play game is a third-person shooter in the “Battle Royale” genre – 100 unarmed players parachute to an island, scavenge for supplies, and attempt to survive. This kind of outage suggests they found, or someone else found a vulnerability and the only mitigation option available was to take the game offline.

These generated more than $15m (£10.5m) on iOS alone over its first three weeks on Apple’s mobile platform – which it joined on 15 March – according to one analytics firm.

In addition to that Reddit thread, the game’s Twitter account is also posting regular updates about the Fortnite server status.

We previously speculated as to what the Port-a-Fort would be once it’s added into the game and we were mostly right. As the name suggests, this mode will pit two 50-player teams against each other, with each team having a bus that arrives on the island from different directions. Either way, Epic has yet to make any comment on any of the current speculation, letting the community work themselves up into a fury.

Monitoring – We’ve worked to mitigate the issue, and are starting to see recovery.

An issue where players’ sprinting/walking animations were broken after firing a Guided Missile while doing these actions. The weapon remains unavailable. Epic Games will soon disclose more about this particular issue and how they are progressing with the same.

The game is now back online, although some players are still experiencing trouble connecting to the game’s servers.